LITERATURE REVIEWS – Find your own path

I really should be working on my paper right now, but had to capture these thoughts that are swirling and threatening to implode…..

The other day at the uni library I asked how many books PhD students like myself were allowed. 50 I was told. I almost burst out laughing! As if anyone would have 50 books out.

As I sit with now 47 weighty books, 300 journal articles printed and a list a mile long of the other references I would like to find, I am no longer laughing.

Starting (and sticking with) the initial literature review for the doctorate has been a challenge for me. The way I approach most things in life is collect ALL the info I need to know on a subject, then go through it systematically, eliminating the things I don’t need and synthesizing down to what I do need in a manageable format. From the start of the year the messages I have been receiving is that this is not the way to go. Instead it is a ‘journey of discovery’ (lilting pan flutes) and you read something and this leads to something else which leads to something else and off you go on a magical journey.

Well for 6 months I tried this approach and let me tell you it did not feel Harry Potteresque. I would read 1 article, from the references at the back it would lead to 10 others, they each lead to more and so on until it became this unmanageable cycle of finding articles (and finding journal articles online can take quite a lot of time, it is a fiddly process when you are doing it as a on-off), reading the article, adding it into the reference list, categorizing it then thinking critically about it and synthesizing it. I got so confused as to what I had found, what I had referenced, how things all fit together that it was driving me insane and I got nowhere.

So the other day I went back to the way that I work – and it is different for everyone. I am a big picture person. I need to see the big picture first, the overall schema, then I can hone into details. But if you just give me details to start with it feels like I am only getting snippets of the picture, I don’t get how things relate to each other, I don’t get how they fit into the scheme of things and I just get confused.

So for the latest ‘area’ for the literature review self-regulated learning (SRL), I did it my way!

The Prue Salter Guide to Literature Review (ie reading what has been researched in this area previously.

1. First I just searched on SLR and found any articles I could. Printed those out. Then I looked through the list of references at the back of these. Found them, printed them out. Then I repeated this process over and over until there were no new names coming up in the references that were relevant to what I was looking at. Within the space of a few hours, I had a pile of 70 journal articles and a really clear picture of who the key people in the field were, what the key articles were (as they were mentioned again and again across different readings).

2. I then went through and typed up all of the references for the bibliography and wrote the author and year of writing at the top.

3. Then I sorted them chronologically ie from oldest to newest as I want to get a feel for how the field developed.

4. Then I lay on my bed with my cats for a few hours and read through all 70 articles from the oldest ones to latest. Yes I am a really fast reader so that helps, but I also would make a judgment as to how relevant that article was and if not as relevant would skim it rather than read in-depth.

5. While reading I sorted into 2 piles, stuff that was really key to what I needed to write about, stuff that was not what I needed right now and would review later.

6. Then I pushed off the cats (they were not happy) and sat down with the articles and some chocolate (I know, should have been nuts and a banana or something healthy but we all have our weaknesses) and wrote a synopsis of the research.

7. I know I will have to go through all the articles again more thoroughly, but at least it is a start and I have a good understanding and a solid base to work from.

Why didn’t I just listen to my instincts and do this months ago?????

This info now was part of the 40 pages of writing I needed to go through and refine to send to my lecturer. So no matter WHAT you did last weekend, you would have been having a better weekend than me.

On the Taronga Zoo Course note, we only have 4 more lessons left but I still have 6 practical days to do at Marine Mammals. We are at the hospital for these last few weeks, Taronga also operate a wildlife hospital where they get birds, possums, turtles etc brought in by the public. This week there was a poor kookaburra with head injuries who looked totally out of it, some stunning owls and an eagle and lots of turtles. We had to practice safe restraint techniques on a baby possum (all 13 of us picked him up one by one, part of his negative conditioning to stop trusting humans so he can go out in the wild, then a long-necked little turtle not much bigger than your hand then a big beautiful cranky sea turtle who was so heavy you could barely lift him (hands front and back of shell) and who demonstrated that when animals are stressed or being handled they will inevitably defecate or urinate on you so be careful how you hold them and where you point them. As one of the students lifted it it shot a stream of foul smelling poo across the white towel.

Perhaps these journal articles aren’t so bad after all.